Entries tagged with webm

I've not posted many entries in the past year-- practically none at all in fact. There's something entirely different about coding and writing prose that makes it difficult to shift between one and the other. Nor have I been particularly good (or even acceptably bad) about responding to questions and replies, especially those asking where Daala is, or where Daala is going in the era of AOM.

Oh. Oh my. After a decade of the MPEG LA saying they were coming to
destroy the FOSS codec movement, with none other than the late Steve Jobs himself chiming in, today the Licensing Authority announced what we already knew.

They got nothing. There will be no Theora patent pool. There will be no VP8 patent pool. There will be no VPnext patent pool.

We knew that of course, we always did. It's just that I never,
in a million years, expected them to put it in writing and
walk away. The wording suggests Google paid some money to grease this along, and the agreement wording is interesting [and instructive] but make no mistake: Google won. Full stop.

This is not an unconditional win for FOSS, of course, the LA narrowed the scope of the agreement as much as they could in
return for agreeing to stop being a pissy, anti-competetive brat. But this is still huge. We can work with this.

For at least the immediate future, I shall have to think some
uncharacteristically nice things about the MPEG LA.*

The WebM folks have finally finished up their work on the WebM Community Cross-License project and announced the license launch. This is a FOSS defensive license/pool similar to what a couple other groups are trying out (and similar to the defensive patent license that Xiph is already using for our parts of Opus within the IETF).

The basic idea of the cross-license is:

"Everyone is free to use any known or unknown WebM patents. Unless you sue over patents related to WebM. In that case, we all agree to yank your license."

In short, it's sort of a NATO for FOSS patents; a free license with an agreed-upon mutual defense clause that tries to enforce everyone playing nice. This strategy is not a new idea, but it's interesting that several different FOSS groups, Xiph and WebM included, are finally trying the idea for real in practice.

Overview:

FFmpeg's built-in Vorbis encoder produces low enough quality output to
be considered broken. This encoder is used by default in the majority
of FFmpeg builds, and will produce .ogv and WebM videos with low to
unusably poor audio quality.

This alert is intended for all users of FFmpeg (via the command line
or GUI wrappers) and all application developers that make use of the
FFmpeg command line tool. Application developers that use the FFmpeg
libraries should also take care that the libavcodec built-in Vorbis
encoder library is not used by accident.

Scope:

All past and present builds of FFmpeg and libavcodec up to but not
including the upcoming 0.6 release. Default builds of the upcoming
FFmpeg 0.6 release will not use the built-in encoder by default, but
it will still be possible to accidentally use or restore the built-in
encoder to default status during the FFmpeg build. It should be
assumed that any build of FFmpeg and any application using FFmpeg
could be producing videos with substandard Vorbis audio unless the
FFmpeg build and usage is verified to be using system Vorbis
libraries, such as those provided by Xiph.Org or aoTuV.

Workaround / Fix:

FFmpeg can be forced to use the external/system libVorbis library by
passing:

-acodec libvorbis

as part of the FFmpeg command line.

Note that passing '-acodec vorbis' is incorrect and requests the
low-quality built-in FFmpeg-internal Vorbis encoder. Also, FFmpeg may
be built without libvorbis support, meaning that many FFmpeg builds
only have the internal encoder available. In this case, requesting
'-acodec libvorbis' will fail with the error 'Unknown encoder
'libvorbis''.

FFmpeg can be built with working libvorbis support and the internal
Vorbis encoder disabled as follows:

Such a build completely removes the internal Vorbis encoder from
libavcodec, eliminating the possibility of accidental use on the
command line or in libavcodec-based applications.

Verification:

Use of a good Vorbis encoder in .ogg, .oga, .ogv and WebM files may be
verified as follows. This test will work on any Ogg or WebM file to
verify the encoder that produced the audio. Note that 'Vorbis' is
case-sensitive:

strings file_to_be_checked | grep Vorbis

A file that was encoded using a good encoder will output a line
containing 'Xiph.Org libVorbis' or 'AoTuV', such as:

Xiph.Org announces support for the WebM open media project

The Xiph.Org Foundation is pleased to announce its support of the
WebM open media project as a project launch partner. As announced
earlier today at the Google I/O Developer Conference, the WebM format
combines the VP8 video codec, the Matroska container, and the Vorbis
audio codec developed by Xiph into a high-quality, open,
unencumbered format for video delivery on the Web. Xiph will continue
to contribute to WebM as a whole and collaborate in its further
development and deployment.

Success within the Open Source community is vital to the larger
success of WebM. Community adoption of a newly opened source base,
such as VP8, is traditionally fraught with peril. Xiph was the
primary organization to develop and promote the earlier VP3 codec when
open sourced by On2, and we know that substantial work lies ahead of
us to make WebM a success. Toward that goal, we look forward to
working with the established community projects also contributing to
WebM including Matroska, ffmpeg, GStreamer, and Mozilla, as well as
open-source oriented business leaders such as Google, Opera, Red Hat
and others.

Kudos to all for the progress we've made, now we've got to get
back to work.

Monty
Xiph.Org

The Xiph.Org Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation
dedicated to open, unencumbered multimedia technology. Xiph's formats
and software levels the playing field for digital media so that all
producers and artists can distribute their work for minimal cost,
without restriction, regardless of affiliation. May contain traces of
nuts or poorly contained awesome.

The title is mostly due to having seen three or four other blog posts simultaneously making this joke. It had popped into my mind too :-)

In case folks hadn't seen yet, Google (as everyone had
expected with bated breath) announced the open sourcing of VP8
today as part of the WebM project. WebM combines a Vorbis
audio stream and a VP8 video stream into a Matroska container for
use in web video. Then there are a whole lot of other tiny project details
like garnering industry support.

Yes, we've actually known for a little while this would be
happening. Google is moving quite fast after having their On2
purchase plans delayed several months. We'll have a press release
up soon expressing support in drier language, though it's mostly
an exercise in formality since everyone already knows our position.

Now that I'm actually allowed to talk about it, the important
bits to take away are:

Of *course* we (Xiph) support WebM. This is great news for
open source, open media, and our own plans at Xiph count on WebM
succeeding. How good the WebM news turns out to be depends on
what we make it.

Vorbis is part of WebM and will probably see a new uptick in
active development. WebM doesn't immediately affect
Theora (development of Theora continues along with VP8), but
that's vaguely irrelevant. The good of unencumbered media is the
point, not Theora or Vorbis or Ogg or any specific piece of
software. We're after a fundamental change to the business and
social environment. Software and software advocacy happens to be
the tool Xiph uses to effect change.

Open media is obviously philosophically 'clean' and good for
the public and good for social transparency. It's even better
for business. Business makes good money on the Web using Open
technologies. In fact, these are the only technologies that have
seen sustained success online. We fully expect that pattern to
hold.

Xiph has been locked in a political battle with a large
monopoly power for years now, and a political fight is not what
Xiph.Org is good at or built for. We're built to research and
develop media software. This announcement gives us breathing
room to get back our primary long term goal: leapfrogging the
proprietary competition. We don't want to be as good, we always
want to be better.